The 9th Annual DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival

Using footage, headlines, and quotes from the mass media, this experimental video explores the images and representations of four Korean American men (John Cho, Yul Kwon, James Kim, Seung-hui Cho) that were featured prominently in the news over the course of six months in 2007.

A letter written by a Muslim prisoner in Guantanamo Bay combined with footage of life in Japanese internment camps raises questions about the perceptions of our enemies and notions of American identity in times of war.

In 1982, during a night out celebrating, Chinese American Vincent Chin was brutally murdered in Detroit by white autoworkers who mistakenly thought he was Japanese.  This singular tragedy is often cited as the beginning of the Asian American civil rights movement, due to the uproar that ensued following a judge’s lenient sentencing of Chin’s attackers.  Now 26 years after the event, how many people actually remember Chin’s murder, the hatred that led up to it, and its long, painful aftermath?

Lam’s probing documentary Vincent Who? explores these and other questions.  It seeks to bring the history of this critical event and the struggles that followed to a new generation of Asian Americans too young to know or remember Vincent Chin.  Through archival footage and interviews with key players in the movement such as Stewart Kwoh, Rene Tajima-Pena, Frank Wu, Lisa Ling and Helen Zia, Lam powerfully retells a watershed event in Asian American history and the legacy it left behind.